Bert Stratton

For a Language Lesson, Oprima el Dos

The janitor at my athletic club liked my Spanish—to a point. He shut me down after several minutes and switched to flawless English. Tutoring wasn’t on his to-do list, apparently. He was from Puerto Rico and effortlessly bilingual. Some…

What’s in the cards for you on New Year’s Eve? Bert Stratton

CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- I had nowhere to go last year on New Year’s Eve. No party, no gig. Nothing. For about 20 years my klezmer band, Yiddishe Cup, played annually at First Night Akron on New Year’s Eve. Then First Night Akron “reduced its…

The Reunion That Didn’t Reunite

At synagogue, a congregant approached me and said I was cool. Why? “Because you went to Brush High,” he said. Brush High was cool? Charles F. Brush High, in Lyndhurst, Ohio? Located in suburban Cleveland, it was a place you graduated from and never…

It’s a Small Store

Mike wanted to open a head shop in a building I own. The storefront was 650 square feet—not big enough for most retailers, at least by my Midwest “amber waves of grain” standards. The best tenant I ever had in there was a plumber who stored PVC pipe…

Who's your favorite band?

by Bert Stratton CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- I occasionally run into young people who lament they didn’t live through the hippie era. They will even listen to my hitchhiking stories. Nobody else will. I tell these young people that the big question in…

Rushing to the Gate Is a Young Man’s Game

It’s great sport to arrive at the airport at the last minute. Nothing tops the adrenaline rush of sprinting to the gate. But I’m not that fast anymore, and I’ve retired from the sport. The exception is Cleveland, where I live, which has a medium-size…

Zagara’s is becoming Dave’s – but what will become of my wheat berry salad? Bert Stratton

CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- My wife cooks. I do the dishes, and I also shop, but mostly for prepared foods. I once had a conniption at Heinen’s in University Heights when I couldn’t find my favorite prepared food -- wheat berry salad. The deli-counter…

It’s All Cake After My Yom Kippur Fast

I fast on Yom Kippur. My parents didn’t fast and my wife doesn’t. Most American Jews don’t fast. Forty percent of American Jews fast the whole day, according to a 2016 Pew study. On Yom Kippur morning, my wife, Alice, eats cereal for breakfast, and I…

Finding a Good Plumber Is a Heavy Lift

Bill Poland, 83, is one of the few I know who answer the phone. Lakewood, Ohio A good plumber, who can find? Mine, Bill Poland, is 83. He won’t do fourth-floor work anymore. In one of the apartment buildings I own, he’ll go only to the third floor…

Strike up the (klezmer) bands for Ukraine: Bert Stratton

CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- There’s that bar scene in “Fiddler on the Roof,” where Ukrainians and Jews drink and dance together. That happens in Cleveland in real life. At a holiday party, a 15-woman choir, dressed in Ukrainian folkloric regalia,…

Who’ll Win the Baby Name Game?

My wife is pushing our pregnant daughter to name the baby Cecil. My daughter is pregnant and wants to talk about baby names. I’m reluctant. My parents never advised me on what to name my kids or how to raise them. My wife and friends all say I should…

We Are All Ukrainians Now

American Jews find the present changes our view of the past. Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania. They’re all the same to many American Jews. I’ve never heard an American Jew boast about his Ukrainian heritage. (One of my grandfathers was from…

Holocaust Remembrance at Café Europa

Everyone in the audience had an astonishing story. Cleveland I played clarinet last month at Café Europa, a Holocaust survivors’ daytime drop-in program. Some of the audience talked during my show, but who has the nerve to tell Holocaust survivors to…

My Deadbeat Tenant Insisted on Eviction

Lakewood, Ohio I went to my first eviction hearing in two years last week. I hadn’t evicted anybody, or lost any rents, during Covid. The neighborhood social-services agency had given out rent vouchers to six delinquent tenants of mine. The tenant in…

A Viking Cruise for Old English Majors

Old Poets: Reminiscences & Opinions, by Donald Hall (Godine, 296 pp., $27.95) In Old Poets, the late poet Donald Hall opines on everything literary (“I suspect that Emily Dickinson, bipolar like most poets, was as eccentric as Marianne Moore”), and…

Never Throw Away Santa Claus

Lakewood, Ohio I got in trouble for throwing out Santa. He was in a storage locker in the basement of one of my apartment buildings. I thought he was junk. I didn’t know he was a “vintage Avon Santa on bicycle ornament from my grandmother,” but that…

Hey, where’s my lake? Bert Stratton

CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights want to make a lake disappear down the block from me. Completely vanish the lake. Horseshoe Lake straddles the Cleveland Heights-Shaker Heights line. What if the mayor in your…

My Father Became His Own Boss

My dad, Toby, hit tennis balls with me after work. He would say: “Racquet back. Hit it now!” He would repeat that for minutes on end. He wore Bermudas and Jack Purcells, and sometimes no shirt. This was appropriate court attire in the 1960s, at least…

California or Bust

“People do not go to the North Pole and fall off icebergs. They go to offices, quarrel with their wives, and eat cabbage soup,” wrote Anton Chekhov. I was just out of college and living at home; my mother had a bridge game scheduled for the next day.…

Cleveland Drops the Ball

‘Cleveland is a city that has been ravaged by financiers and industrialists . . . its population abandoned to their fate, left to freeze their ass off, standing in the dirty winter slush, waiting for a bus that is a long time coming. Somehow they go…